


it's like marrow without bone (to live in a house with no home)

by alesford



Series: these are only moments [4]
Category: Wynonna Earp (TV)
Genre: Angst, Don't worry, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Everybody Lives, F/F, at least everybody that's alive when the story starts, brief gun violence, can you spot the other canadians?, i don't bury my gays, post-s2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-06
Updated: 2018-06-06
Packaged: 2019-05-18 20:45:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,302
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14859989
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alesford/pseuds/alesford
Summary: “I just wanted to be free.”Nicole knows that voice. It sends chills down her spine as quickly as it makes her blood boil. She knows that voice because she heard it before she got shot.ORAn incident takes Nicole to the other purgatory where she encounters the other Earp sister. The one that's supposed to be dead and in hell for causing the shitstorm they've been dealing with this past year.





	it's like marrow without bone (to live in a house with no home)

**Author's Note:**

> The plot bunnies got to me again. They're kind of awful but they're also kind of great? Maybe?
> 
> I was re-watching the end of season one and for some reason I wanted to try to redeem Willa just a teeny, tiny bit. So here we go. Hope you enjoy the ride!
> 
> Any and all mistakes are my own. I don't own Wynonna Earp.
> 
> Title from "Curs in the Weeds" by Horse Feathers.

 

 

 **it's like marrow without bone (to live in a house with no home)**  
_Maybe God is God._  
_Maybe the Devil is me._  
_Well, I'll just throw my chains on._  
_And tell myself that I'm free._  
_\- Delta Spirit, "Salt in the Wound"_

 

“I just wanted to be free.”

Nicole knows that voice. It sends chills down her spine as quickly as it makes her blood boil. She knows that voice because she heard it before she got _shot_.

  
(The first time. Not… not this time?

    Huh.

        Where’s Waverly? Wynonna?

            Where is _she_?)

  
“You’re in purgatory,” the voice tells her and she whirls around in a fury, brown eyes narrowing as she takes in the sight of Willa Earp. And then she takes a moment to take in their surroundings.

It’s the sheriff’s station. Lonnie’s desk is still a mess and Nedley’s office door is propped ajar. Her own desk still has two binders, a stack of case files, and a mountain of paperwork on it. The small AM/FM radio clock flashes like it might after a loss of power.

It’s the sheriff’s station and it’s empty. There’s no Nedley or Lonnie or Dov or Chris. There’s no Nash, either. There’s nobody but Nicole and Willa.

She feels it now. The stillness of the air and the heaviness in her chest that threatens to turn into something like panic. She closes her eyes and counts to twenty, inhaling for five and exhaling for five until she feels calmer. When she opens her eyes, she hopes to see Wynonna and Waverly staring at her like she’s lost her mind; it’d be better than the reality, which is cracking an eye open to see Willa staring at her with an aura of impatience and maybe something like resentment.

“You aren’t dead. Yet,” she says. It’s so blasé, the way those words come out of her mouth and the sigh that follows.

Nicole pales and shakes her head. Shakes away the unnerving feeling settling in the pit of her stomach.

“Where are we?” she asks.

Willa rolls her eyes. “I already told you. We’re in purgatory. You know, that annoying place between Down There and Upstairs.”

“Purgatory,” Nicole says again. It isn’t a question this time because she remembers now. Being shot. Again.

  
_Charles Gagnon had marched into the station and pulled a gun on the room, demanding his brother be released from their custody. Henri Gagnon had been arrested the previous night, swerving down Main Street drunker than Wynonna after a shit day. The damned hoser had sideswiped Nicole’s cruiser while she was responding to a 10-71 of suspicious activity at the bank across from Shorty’s. His saving grace was that she hadn’t been in the vehicle when he took off a layer of paint and her side mirror. His downfall was that he panicked, stopped his own car, and tried to make a run for it._

_He was caught, of course. She’d marched him down the block to the station, tossed him into the drunk tank, suspended his license, and wrote him a fine. The rest of the night was procedural — dealing with his car and her cruiser, the headache of paperwork that such an incident incurred, and trying not to fall asleep during the last hour of the graveyard shift while she sat at her desk handling said paperwork. Especially since she had to turn around and come back to work that afternoon._

_Such is the life of a sheriff’s deputy._

_But getting shot — again? That is a hazard of living in Purgatory where just about everybody owns a gun or has access to one. Not to mention the crazies and the supernatural._

_Charles Gagnon fell into the former category. A little off his rocker with a short fuse and serious co-dependency issues with his brother. When he began waving the gun around, it was Nicole who stepped forward with her hands raised and her movements as unthreatening as she could make them. She walked slowly towards him, putting herself between Waverly and the madman._

_“Let’s just talk this out, Charles,” she had said gently._

_She tried to follow the handbook and her police academy training. They’d roleplayed scenarios with gunmen and hostages. And after the situation last year with Wynonna, Shorty, and Champ, she had attended a two-day seminar in the big city with a TAC team. Except none of those things prepared her when he pulled the trigger anyways._

_She remembers pushing Waverly to the ground and Wynonna drawing Peacemaker. She remembers falling and another gunshot and then Waverly shouted her name. But then…_

  
_Oh._

  
_She fell. The floor was cold and it felt so nice because her shoulder was_ burning _and_ aching _. And then Waverly was there, her Waverly, scrambling to lean over her. Her hands went to Nicole’s shoulder and she pressed._ Hard _. Nicole screamed. And then…_

 

Then she was here. With Willa freakin’ Earp.

 

“And she remembers.”

Nicole scowls. “Do you have to be such an asshole? I’m apparently _dying_ and I don’t even know if Waverly and Wynonna are okay!”

Willa’s face softens at the names of her sisters. “They’re fine,” she tells Nicole. “They’re _both_ fine. Wynonna shot the guy who shot you.”

Despite everything that happened following Willa’s return, despite having every reason not to trust her, Nicole believes her. It’s a reassurance that she needs to hear, and it allows her room to consider her current situation more clearly.

“I’m dying,” she murmurs. It’s barely audible but it feels so incredibly loud. Those words. “I’m dying.”

“You’re not dead, yet,” Willa reminds her, gentler this time.

Nicole’s eyes widen.

“I can go back?”

She begins to scan the room, looking for any bright gateway or swirl of lights so she can steadfastly sprint in the exact opposite direction. Willa must recognize what she’s doing by her darting eyes.

There’s a sigh and a shake of her head. “It isn’t a choice. This isn’t like on television. It’s out of our control.”

“Is that why you’re still here?”

Nicole blinks and suddenly they’re standing in the Pine Barrens near Purgatory. There’s a heavy layer of snow on the ground and it continues to fall with flurries dusting the evergreens and the branches of the trees that dropped their leaves long ago. It’s quiet and almost hauntingly beautiful.

She can’t feel the cold or the wind that rustles the branches and sends them swaying just barely.

“This is my purgatory,” Willa says. “I’ve been here since I crossed the border, since Wynonna…” She trails off, never completing the sentence.

Since Wynonna shot her. Since her sister shot her. Since she made the most foolish mistake of her life. Since she lost everything.

“I just wanted to be free,” she says again, even softer this time.

Nicole recognizes the weight in her voice. Has heard it in her own voice so many times throughout her life. It’s the heaviness of regret, of exhaustion, of sadness, and of defeat. It’s the pull of so many, _I’m sorry_ ’s that can never be enough to undo what’s been done.

“Free from Daddy, from the Earp curse, from that godforsaken town. From remembering what I had and what I had lost. Free from having to be anybody but Willa. I just wanted to be free.”

It’s a desperate explanation, stained by bitterness and something like selfishness. It isn’t an apology or imploring for forgiveness. It’s the story of a young girl who had to grow up too fast and be too much too soon, who found pain and darkness in every corner of her world.

Nicole knows something about that. It’s a tale with which she’s very familiar. She isn’t sure she ever really knew what light was until she met Waverly and fell in with Wynonna and got to know Nedley and the rest of the town. Until she found a place that felt like home and people she could call family.

But Willa— Willa never got that chance. To really get free from the machinations of souls older than both of their years combined. To find her own light somewhere out there.

She looks at Willa out here, a bright spot of life, morose as she may be, in this vast wilderness and unending white that’s only speckled with forest green and ash gray tree trunks and limbs. And when she blinks again, they’re back in the empty cop shop.

“I wish you’d had the chance to be free without being such a shithead,” Nicole finally says. It isn’t forgiveness but it is understanding and maybe a tinge of sympathy.

Willa laughs. It’s rough and sharp and sounds like it hurts her as much as it disquiets Nicole. “Yeah,” she says. “Except I didn’t have the chance and now I’m here. Waiting for the Universe to decide where I belong or if I’ll never belong anywhere except purgatory.”

“I don’t think anybody belongs nowhere,” Nicole offers, though the optimism sounds uncertain even to her own ears.

Willa shakes her head. “No, it’s okay. I have to pay for my sins somehow, right?”

  
The sadness is clearer now. The despair and defeat that clings to the once heir. It holds tight to her, suffocating like a python’s constriction; each gasp for air brings you a little bit closer to death.

  
“I’m sorry it wasn’t different.” Nicole means these words.

“Me too.”

  
It isn’t absolution but it’s something. The grip of sadness loosens just slightly.

  
There’s a buzz beneath Nicole’s skin. Like the tingling of a limb falling asleep when you sit or sleep funny.

“Do you feel that?” she asks Willa.

And Willa looks at her and cants her head to one side. It’s a Waverly-sort of mannerism, and Nicole feels a sharp tug at her heart.

“The tingling and that chest pain?” she clarifies when Willa doesn’t respond.

The hum of her body grows and grows and it’s starting to become really uncomfortable. It feels kind of like what she imagines being lit on fire might feel like.

“They’re saving you,” Willa finally tells her. “The Universe. My sisters.”

“I’m… I’m not going to die?”

Nicole’s jaw tenses with another lance through her chest.

“You’re not going to die.”

Willa’s voice begins to fade, sounding distant against the blood roaring in her ears. The edges of her vision start to go black as the pain increases exponentially. She hears Willa speak to her one more time and she strains to listen as she squeezes her eyes tight and feels herself begin to fall over.

“Look after them, okay? Tell them that I love them. Both of them.”

  
And then she wakes up with a jolt, her eyes snapping open to meet the most wonderful hazel eyes she’s ever known.

  
“Waverly,” she breathes. And it _hurts._ It hurts and she’s alive.

There’s a steady beeping of machines next to her and her left arm is slinged. Her head is fuzzy and all the lights are soft but she’s _alive_ and Waverly is safe and so is Wynonna and Willa is marginally less awful than she’d thought before she got shot. Again.

“Nicole. You’re awake,” Waverly whispers with a bright smile and tears in her eyes.

“I’m here, Waves,” she says and she can hear her words slur, loosened by whatever drugs they’re pumping through her veins. “I’m alive.”

“You almost died, Nicole. Again. Again! You’re like a cat with nine lives, I swear, Officer Haught.” She pushes from her chair next to Nicole’s bed and paces the length of the small room. She’s exasperated and Nicole can tell she’s a little angry, the emotion warring with the elation that Nicole is awake and alive.

  
Alive and awake.

  
“I saw Willa,” she mumbles. “In purgatory. That’s where I went when I was waiting to live or die.”

Waverly slumps back into her seat and reaches for the hand of her not shot-up arm. “What are you talking about, baby?”

She feels the medication even more saliently now. She has to fight against it, the fog that wants to cloud her brain and pull her back under. Part of her is afraid she won’t wake up again.

  
(It’s going to be a thing, isn’t it?)

  
What she tries to say is this: “I saw Willa in purgatory. The real limbo, between heaven and hell kind of purgatory. She said she just wanted to be free and I kind of understand that. She wants you to know that she loves you, both you and Wynonna. And she asked me to look after you guys.”

It doesn’t come out that clear and concise but Waverly’s smart and Waverly knows her girlfriend and Waverly knows how to piece together drunken, slurred speech like nobody else. She gets the message and her eyes tear up even more than before.

“She said that?” she asks and the question is so, so soft and scared and hopeful.

Nicole’s head dips in a nod. “She said that.”

Waverly wipes at her eyes and laughs a sad but happy laugh. The words are a lifetime too late but they do mean something. They do begin to patch the hole in her heart that’s been torn through with so much grief and trauma and loss. She laughs again.

“She’s still the worst,” Waverly grumbles.

“Totally the worst.”

Waverly holds tight to Nicole. It’s enough of an anchor and a promise that it feels okay to drift away for just a short while. She’s got Waverly to tether her down so she can float away to dreamland and not fly too far away.

Nicole dreams of falling snow and the smell of evergreens and feels the warmth of a crackling fire in a hearth. She dreams of three little girls with smiles on their faces as they run happy and free.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on tumblr [here](http://awol-newt.tumblr.com).


End file.
